523 replies to this topic

[General]

Kichō, on 28 November 2011 - 09:05, said:

Sengoku Basara 3 Utage. 8/10

Only complaint is that they're lazy (ie reskinning a weapon without doing too much) and lack of English release. However it's Capcom after all.

Anyone played these kind of games before?

I did play second one, known as Devil Kings, it was ok.
If you love Capcom games and still did not try Monster Hunter series, I highly recommend it, it is one of the most original games I saw. And pretty enjoyable imho.

[Alias]

Now that I've finally finished uni I have free time again.

Trine 2

Brilliant indie title, even better than the first Trine (which was great in it's own right). It looks absolutely gorgeous, the puzzles are harder although probably not as complex as I would have liked, still a great 6 hours+ in singleplayer with I'm sure a brilliant multiplayer (which I haven't got around to trying yet, but having seen videos of it, it looks like buckets of fun). For $15 it's a steal, although it will probably go on sale in the Christmas sales so if you can wait it might be an idea to.

Definitely recommended, 9.5/10. I pretty much gave up on Skyrim while playing this, it's just so much more fun. Here's a screenshot if you're not convinced (click for 1080p).



Skyrim

Coming off Oblivion (which in my opinion, had far too many flaws that detracted from the quality that was there) I wasn't sure what to expect with Skyrim. It's definitely fixed a lot of issues, in particular it's far less repetitive than Oblivion was - where 80% of the game consisted of going from Oblivion gate 1 to Oblivion gate 2, killing the same 3 enemies over and over to pretty much no reward. It was welcoming to have a much larger variety of regular enemies than Oblivion ever had, I will admit I had a good laugh the first time I got whacked into the air by a giant.

From my previous experience with Bethesda games, I pretty much focussed entirely on getting sneak as high as possible as it is usually the single most powerful skill tree in the game, and Skyrim is no exception. If you're careful, with sneak 50 and the dagger perk you can easily kill 90% of everything you encounter, from sneak 70 or so you're just about undetectable to anything except for dragons (even when right in front of their face) and with sneak 100 there are times when you can get 2 sneak attacks in a row on one target because they didn't realise you hitting them the first time. From my 50 hours or so I've had in the game across 3 different characters the assassin was easily the best - and it has advantages further than just the character itself.

The Dark Brotherhood storyline, which took around the same amount of time to complete as the entire main quest, was absolutely brilliant. You easily get the best loot out of any of the sidequests, you pretty much roll in gold from around 5 or 6 missions in and in comparison to the other storylines the twist was actually alright (although still pretty unnecessary, to be honest). The 2x sneak damage from the starter gear means that once you get the dagger perk you can pretty much one-hit anything with a decent dagger (make sure you get Mehrunes' Razor asap). On top of that, the Thieves Guild quests get more towards an assassin class towards the end (don't want to spoil anything) and has a pretty decent storyline too.

Back to things they improved from Oblivion, the new engine is definitely a relief from bloody Gamebyro. It doesn't have a severe case of Bethesda Face like Oblivion and Fallout 3 had where the faces looked absolutely horrendous. It definitely has a huge sense of scale and it feels far less artificial than Fallout 3 and Oblivion where everything was pretty much the same everywhere. The environments are pretty well made and I'm surprised how much content they fit into 6gb, although I'll explain more of that later.

Now onto some of the flaws - the main quest itself was pretty underwhelming to be honest. Pretty stock standard the whole way through, really predictable storyline and a very anticlimactic final boss fight. I was sort of glad it took less than around a quarter of my actual gaming time to complete - I've heard reports of people from Bethesda doing a competition where one of their staff finished the entire main quest in around 2 hours. Another huge negative is the animal physics, it's just completely ridiculous. I'm sorry, but bipeds are actually better at climbing steep surfaces than quadrupeds, not to mention it's completely stupid that anything could climb a 80 degree incline, yet horses in Skyrim can.

Now the biggest flaw of all - the voice acting. It seriously broke the entire immersion for me, even more than cliff climbing horses. When you realise 95% of the NPCs have the same voice actor it just feels really, really cheap. This is a $100 million dollar game, they could at least hire 20 generic voice actors to do basic NPC lines rather than using the same 3 people. It's like they had someone doing voice casting, but then they took an arrow in the knee. The lack of voice acted lines is also a pretty good explanation why the game is only 6gb in total - I mean just the DLC for Mass Effect 2 are 6gb all together, not counting the 20gb for the main game.

It's definitely a time sink, and I guess in that regard it might be worth the money. But it still has too many flaws for me to call it game of the year, or even a 'brilliant' game. Sure it's fun, and it's good they've fixed a lot of flaws from Oblivion but in its place they've introduced quite a few more. Probably worth it on sale at around $30, but I wouldn't pay full price.

8/10

[Chyros]

Limbo - 7,5/10



A bargain I picked up for only €2,50 on recommendation of Alias and Ghostrider, this indie game is a remarkable piece of work.

Today's word is "simplicity". The game starts without putting you into a menu, and there are no difficulty levels, no graphics settings other than gamma, no controls other than the arrow keys and ctrl (and they are not customiseable but that's not really necessary with such simple controls anyway); not even a save or load option (the game only features a "resume" option). The graphics are all black and white as you can see from the screenshot, and takes place in 2D, but the scenery appears to have depth as well as very strong depth of field and parallax. The lack of sharp lines and strong blurry effects, coupled with the fantastic use of shades of black and white actually makes this game, despite is extremely obvious lack of high-tech graphics, look REALLY good. I'd go as far as to say its graphics are actually one of its strong points; do NOT be scared by the lack of gigabyte graphics stuff because the game looks completely seamless.

The atmosphere in the game is very good as well. Again drawing from simplicity, no story is ever told, no text is ever shown on the screen, no dialog ever takes place, there is no tutorial or help function of any kind, there aren't even any "levels" - though the game is divided into two dozen or so chapters this is completely unapparent from the game as no division is ever used - when played the game appears to be one giant level with no stops or apparent save points. The game even practically completely lacks music.

Perhaps most comparable to Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus, the game has a strong sense of sadness and apocalypse about it - a fitting theme for a gme called Limbo, obviously. Like AO/AE it features strong themes of old forest nature as well as broken-down industrial themes. However, unlike said games, which are very dependent on cutscenes, monologues, narratives etc., Limbo's feel is powered only by the world it takes place in. This world is extremely appealing and you can't help but want to explore it.

The game is a subtle puzzle game. The player, of whom it is not told in any way who or what they are, why they are here, or how long they have been here to begin with, needs to navigate the world by interacting with the environment. The puzzles have a distinct Portal-esque feel to them, with a limited amount of things being in the world for the player to interact with, however the game covers up this repetitiveness quite well by introducing subtle look and mechanical changes. The puzzles are extremely easy though, and the onyl reason you might fail them is because they require some quite nifty timing at places which can be a bit hard. The puzzles are hardly intellectually challenging though, with the solution being quite straightforward in most cases. This is not to say the puzzles are boring, however.

The main problems with a game of this kind are that it is only two or three hours long and it is not exactly replayable, which is why I can't exactly rate it higher than a 7,5. Nonetheless, it will last you as long as any movie, and it's a lot cheaper than going to the cinema .

[Chyros]

Syndicate - 4,5/10

WARNING: big spoilers.

First of all, know that this review comes from a diehard fan of the series. Expectations with me are about as high as they're going to get.

The game is about a future world, think about 2070, where megacorporations, syndicates, rule the world. People are controlled because they get chip implants, which allows the syndicates to monitor the civilians extremely closely. Think Big Brother. Wars are no longer wars, but rather tactical operations involving sabotage, espionage and assassination. The ones carrying out all this are Agents, cybernetically enhanced humans implanted with chips and (originally) also metal skeletal enhancements. They are basically the biggest force to be reckoned with. The player plays an Agent with the very latest generation of chip, the DART 6 chip.

Easiest is probably if I just divide the review in good points and bad points. I'll start off with the good points.

-First of all, the single biggest praise I can give is that the the (visual) universe is very well put into the game. I can only extend great compliments on this. The world of the Syndicate series is a dark cyberpunk world where everything is about technology and corporations rule everything mercilessly by controlling your mind as much as possible (I'll get back to this later). Not only does the world LOOK exactly as you'd expect of a proper cyberpunk world, the makers also gave the world the feeling you'd expect. Everything looks extremely gadgety, it also looks and feel very dark and oppressing. My sincerest praise on this point.

-The weapons feature alternate firing modes. Something quite interesting of course. They definitely wanted to make the weapons highly diverse. Some ideas are really interesting too, such as a weapon with homing bullets.

-The DART overlay, a feature granted by the DART 6 chip, is a kind of Predator-vision-meets-They-Live-sunglasses-meets-bullet-time, looks quite cool. It allows you to see enemies through walls and with enhanced contrast, and slows everything down.

-The makers put in a really interesting effect. In accordance with the subtle and less-than-subtle indoctrination syndicates exert on their citizens, there is a lot of subliminal messaging everywhere. These texts are put there by syndicates and you can't normally see them, however they become consciously visible when you switch on the DART overlay, which is really cool. An example (normally only the logo is visible):



In addition, there is a resistance of some civilians who aren't tolerating all this anymore. These also apply the same type of ink painting over syndicate posters, changing the ads radically when looking at them in normal or DART vision modes. Normally:


with DART overlay:


-The DART chip the player has implemented affords him with massive hacking power that allows him to override chip functions of enemies, forcing them to commit suicide, turning on their former comrades etc. This is actually quite an interesting gameplay element and though crudely implemented it works very well. Kudos on this for sure.

And then finally, the bad points.

-The game uses the Frostbite 2 engine which makes everything look absolutely godawful. Even though it's been remarked that Syndicate look much more colourful than BF3, which is true, everything is still monochrome because of the extremely limited colour palette of the engine. Worse, AGAIN like BF3, the game has extremely strong light scatter effects which makes it look like there's fog everywhere and consequently everything is completely blindingly bright, both indoors and outdoors. As a result, it's very hard to see anything, especially enemies, which look relatively innocuous, unless you use the DART overlay, which has extremely limited use times (though it recharges eventually). Some examples:






When in-game and not static like the screenshots, the moving and looking around (especially wih the motion blur effects which are IMO Satan), makes it all but impossible to see anything.

-The game is set in a cyberpunk world which means the designers could go as mental as they wanted to with the weapons. But they didn't. In fact everything feels extremely samey. In contrast to the originals' insanely powerful and diverse weaponry, they went for relatively conventional bullet firearms with red dots sights and ACOG scopes. In addition, everything has BF-itis, so everything is extremely weak. As a result, there are no weapons that are fun to use, because using everything feels like a major disappointment due to the low damage it does. The only exception is the minigun, which is the ultimate weapon in the game, is very powerful and has infinite ammo. Not something we haven't seen in other games, to be sure. For reference, the minigun was a starting weapon in Syndicate Wars, and the weakest weapon in the game after the Uzi, and all "bullet" weapons actually ran on rechargable batteries and fired plasma bullets. This Syndicate game could've been just as exciting if the designers were a little less conservative. Gone are the nuclear hand grenades, satellite bombardments, graviton guns, etc. etc.

-The game is based on the original Syndicate, and takes place right before or even during Syndicate Wars. However, the designers completely missed the whole point of the originals' plots and the whole world structure is utterly wrong. Everybody has free will and are only influenced by the subliminal messages, instead of everyone being implanted and being under complete control. The Church of the New Epoch, a terrorist/freedom fighter organisation that has just bloomed up in Syndicate. However instead of them gaining foothold by introducing a virus that makes everyone's chip malfunction, they are just spreading videos and writing wall messages to liberate the people, all of which feels very weak and wrong and doesn't do the originals justice. The originals has a MUCH more depressing, Brave New World feeling to them, which made the world feel more alive than it does in Syndicate.

-On the same note, though the player does still play for the EuroCorp syndicate, which is one of the many syndicates fighting for powers in the original Syndicate and the sole, dominant world power in Syndicate Wars, the entire game takes place in America, despite it clearly being about EUROcorp, which was originally headquartered in London but is now headquartered in New York for no apparent reason. The player would also originally travel all over the world to undertake their ops against terrorists and rival syndicates, but the developers obviously couldn't conceive of a world outside the US and so all missions take place in the US, even the ones battling foreign Syndicates. Unlike one might think at this point, the developers aren't American but Swedish, by the way.

-The controls and movement are extremely annoying. I am presuming that this comes from its BF roots but everything doesn't work like it ought to. The player is constantly fidgeting, all movements are extremely imprecise, and the player tends to do weird manoeuvres at unexpected times, suddenly diving or jumping or doing something unexpected that you didn't want to do at all. Also, aiming is relatively hard because the mouse sensitivity has extremely bad customiseability (there are what, six or so different sensitivities in total?), has some kind of very strong smoothing effect and tends to either overshoot the target or stop short of it. The other controls aren't very customiseable either, no secondary buttons available, no hold ADS button, commands like "use" and "hack" split up for no good reason since they really do they same but you need two different buttons now, no grenade throw button (only a select button - I think the last serious shooter that didn't have a throw grenade button was what, CoD 1?), no prone, a crouch that lowers the player only by about 1 cm in height, etc. The character is also absolutely dwarfish, feeling like just 1,60 m tall or something, which makes it feel like you're crouching all the time, and you can't see very well because of this. Other examples include the player not being able to fire when close to a wall or obstacle, because the game feels it is necessary to twist the player into some kind of stupid posture from which you cannot fire. Almost everything boils down to realism you-know-what-but-I-can't-say-it-because-it-offends-certain-people.

-The player is played in first person perspective, complete with freeness of will, but this makes no sense. The Agents are chipped to such a degree that originally they wouldn't even return fire unless the player ordered them to do so. They were basically robots that couldn't conceive of doing anything that they weren't ordered explicitly to do. In this game, the player controls a character directly, which has emotions, free thought, and can even revolt against its creators. This makes absolutely no sense and feels unbelievably fake and cheap. Worse still, there are only four characters in the whole game and the story is weak and as deep as a teaspoon. Whoever wrote the plot couldn't write a toddler's book.

-The player is extremely weak. Though the Agents are supposed to be basically the Terminator which a metal endoskeleton and implants everywhere, the player has notable trouble even prying open doors or running or jumping, and is downed relatively fast. All this severely undermines the whole concept that Agents are supposed to be one man armies that represent the absolute cutting edge in technology. Instead, the player feels like a weak, limp bag of shit.

-The enemies are extremely boring to fight, with the normal soldiers being very easy and bland (and they just hide behind obstacles all the time) and sometimes a boss in the form of enemy Agents which have widely varying powers completely unlike yours. Because the enemies are too easy, eventually they introduce enemies that are invulnerable to spice things up. Until you hack their armour and they they become vulnerable again. And then they appear with minions with "hack-distorting" stuff that makes you unable to hack unless you kill them. And then later those are covered by other things you need to blahblah first. Invulnerable enemies aren't really that fun and really feel like a desperation move on the part of the designers. Also, the boss battles are unbelievably frustrating, boring and counterintuitive and regularly hardly or even not at all involve any firing, but rather hacking certain things fast enough to counter attack X. This results in boss battles centering around stuff like hacking ping-pong with missiles and hacking cover positions to rise up out of the ground and stuff like that, and much of it is not exactly intuitive. There is also no save feature so if you fail the battle you have to start over completely. Combined with the boring weapons and useless controls, the combat as a whole is nothing exciting at all.

-Every single thing you go through is a closed door or vent you need to open by pushing F rapidly. After about two times the novelty kind of wore off, but you have to do this literally dozens of times. Not the greatest issue ever but one can't help but wonder... Why?!



Overall, I'd say "nice try". They gave it a good shot, but the piss-poor implementation, weak story and insane liberties they took with the universe do kind of ruin it. Being as unfaithful to the originals as it is (the player wears a leather coat and works for a company called EuroCorp and that's almost everything it has in common with its predecessors), you should not in any way look at this as being a sequel.

Edited by Chyros, 02 March 2012 - 00:30.

[Wanderer]

You did remember take the aim assist off?

[Raven]

Dear Esther 6/10

I tried this solely on reviews which said that I have to give it a try to see it for myself. Well, its not a bad experience, but there nothing much to do. Those of you who have heard about it would know, the story is based on an Hebridian Island now isolated and you are the sole inhabitant. The story is told through a monologue which reads out a set of letters written to Esther, the narrator's (player's) wife.

The game is so different because you can hardly call it a game. The story or fragments of the letters are read out when you reach certain points in the island, and they are read randomly. So the content you get differs for each playthrough. All the player has to do is to guide the character to different locations in the island at your leisure. The graphics are really nice on the highest setting. It manages to capture the beauty of the environment and the sound and musical effects really does enable you to feel the extent of your isolation.

The game also takes you to a beautifully crafted underground cave, which is full of luminescent rocks. It really does look good. The island is littered with graffiti that give more clues to the story behind the narrator. All in all its a good experiment, where the game is used more as an interactive art rather than a game. An entire playthrough would take only around 2 hours.

Gfx: 8/10
Gameplay: N/A (Virtually non existent)
Sound: 9/10
Innovation: 8/10

As an experiment this is a great effort IMO. However, it remains to be seen whether this a success or not. As a game I'd say no. But as an art form yes. If I rate this as an art form, it would score 8/10 from me.

[Chyros]

Wanderer, on 02 March 2012 - 01:32, said:

You did remember take the aim assist off?

Yes, in fact I haven't even played it with aim assist on at all . Can't imagine how bad it must be with it on Oo .

Edited by Chyros, 02 March 2012 - 07:16.

[Sgt. Rho]

Mass Effect 3 - 6 of 10. 7 if I'd feel generous.

Overall pretty awesome. But the ending doesn't even rate on a scale from 0 to 10, that's how bad it is, and since the story plays a pretty damn big role for me in Mass Effect, that drags it down quite a lot.

Edited by Sgt. Rho, 09 March 2012 - 17:05.

[Alias]

Sgt. Rho, on 09 March 2012 - 16:31, said:

Mass Effect 3 - 6 of 10. 7 if I'd feel generous.

Overall pretty awesome. But the ending doesn't even rate on a scale from 0 to 10, that's how bad it is, and since the story plays a pretty damn big role for me in Mass Effect, that drags it down quite a lot.

Disappointing, but not surprising.

Looks like the last 'good' game Bioware has made is ME2. All they need to do is fix up the utterly retarded writing team.

[Sgt. Rho]

I was actually surprised. I mean, I didn't expect a terribly good ending, but not THIS.

[Krieger22]

Need for Speed: The Run (PC): 4.6/10 May be affected by PC only gripes.


I tried this to see whether Black Box could actually bring itself back to form and to see what they spent 2-3 years on. It's not entirely a disaster, but it's sufficiently far from what I'd nominate, much less vote for for an award. Those who've heard of it should know the basic premise of the plot, your character is some guy who's pissed off some Well Armed People and must participate (and win) a race across the U.S.A. to "get his life back".

The game has a story, but it probably doesn't even merit the phrase "skeleton plot". Why and how your character is in trouble is never properly explained, and in fact the people trying to kill you rarely appear throughout the race

Spoiler

save for Chicago and a good part of Ohio. Oh and the asshat in the maroon Aston Martin One-77 who rams or shoots at you several times throughout the race only to get his in New York. And the junkyard sequence that starts the game.

And those two Sports Illustrated models? I see 2 appearances, unless you count that billboard in San Francisco.



Gameplay in the campaign is fairly interesting, but not in a good way as overtaking 210 other people is somehow cut up into various small bits. The challenge series is somewhat better, as the challenges can be very challenging, especially the later ones. Multiplayer is decent, but it can be a pain for those with poor internet connections like me, at least when the connection is at a low ebb (never had such issues with Hot Pursuit). The controls are fairly fine, except that the "buttons" that need to be pressed in the QTEs are mapped to some rather unlikely places (if they hadn't disappeared due to some random bug causing bits and pieces of my HUD to disappear). Resets are a good idea but they've been implemented in a rather weird way as they add tenths of seconds or in the case of the "soft" resets, reset you behind everyone else. Also I'd really like to punch the idiot who thought forcing the Origin and Autolog friend lists was a good idea. Origin isn't as bad as Games for Windows Live, but there are some things I'd draw the line at. To paraphrase the saying, some people are best raced and not heard.


Graphics are good even on low and is fairly colourful, but they aren't BF3 good with what they are. Also I think the fact that they optimized Frostbite 2 to PS3 and then optimized it for PC has negatively affected the engine's performance overall. And whatever they use for photo mode kills quality deader than a bullet through someone's lower brain.

Overall, I'd say "nice try", but their piss poor implementation of various things gets in the way. A lot. Still better than World though.

Edited by Krieger22, 13 March 2012 - 01:53.

[Raven]

Sgt. Rho, on 09 March 2012 - 16:31, said:

Mass Effect 3 - 6 of 10. 7 if I'd feel generous.

Overall pretty awesome. But the ending doesn't even rate on a scale from 0 to 10, that's how bad it is, and since the story plays a pretty damn big role for me in Mass Effect, that drags it down quite a lot.

What ending did u get. No spoilers . I mean was it a good ending a bad one? What was your final EMS?

[Sgt. Rho]

A bad one I think. Everything exploded...final EMS was around 1700 or so I think...

[Raven]

I too think thats a bad ending. EMS can go as high as 5000 AFAIK. Didn't read any spoilers or walkthroughs. There are supposed to be 17 endings. 8 each for destroying the collector base or not and 1 special ending if you played only ME3.

1750 is the min EMS i think. The 8 endings in each case are depending on the EMS level. They have defined EMS bands. Did u get this score without MP and doing all sidequests/scan?

[Libains]

Raven, on 13 March 2012 - 02:37, said:

I too think thats a bad ending. EMS can go as high as 5000 AFAIK. Didn't read any spoilers or walkthroughs. There are supposed to be 17 endings. 8 each for destroying the collector base or not and 1 special ending if you played only ME3.

1750 is the min EMS i think. The 8 endings in each case are depending on the EMS level. They have defined EMS bands. Did u get this score without MP and doing all sidequests/scan?

Basically, to get all three choices you need to get an EMS over about 2900. To get the perfect endings to those choices you need to have 5k+. 1700 EMS would have been the worst ending possible iirc.

[Alias]

AJ - besides the endings, is the rest of it sufficiently decent? GMG has it for $48 which is pretty much 50% off the Australian price.

[Libains]

Alias, on 13 March 2012 - 07:45, said:

AJ - besides the endings, is the rest of it sufficiently decent? GMG has it for $48 which is pretty much 50% off the Australian price.

I'd probably give it about 8.5/9 out of ten. The sidequests get a little tedious, but aside from those, and the endings being abhorrent, the game is an absolute gem. The story ties together the previous two games in a way that I didn't think would ever be that good, and is apparently all the better if you get an ME2 save imported. So yeah, get it, and enjoy the journey

[CJ]

Everyone talking about the endings got me worried, but after 28 hours of playing the game myself (haven't finished it yet, since I want to get all the quests done), I could care less about the endings being "shit".
This game gets a 10/10 in my books, so far. mainly thanks to the fact that they've removed the useless mako "exploration" and the extremely time consuming planet scans for anomalies in ME2, as well as the combat system being heavily fixed.

[Alias]

Looks like they've restricted it to US only now, guess EA doesn't want my business.

[CJ]

Oh, I finished the game now, and I see why everyone's complaining about the end. It's bullcrap, just like all the times you see that character in the game. But it still was a great game to play nonetheless.

[Anubis]

This is my first post in this tread, but somehow i felt this game is the one to start it with.
Mass Effect 3 - Rate 1/10. This may seem extreme but i will explain.
I finished the game a second time, doing 2 or 3 assets quests i missed in the first one and i also tried to view the story/gameplay better. So to explain my rating of this game. Mass effect is a hybrid of 2 genres - RPG and 3rd person shooter. However it's power has always been the story. There's shit tons of RPG's out there that do the RPG part justice and there are shit tons of 3rd person shooters that do gameplay well. We cannot even start to compare mass effect rpg side with that of kingdoms of amalur or the witcher, nor can we compare the cover shoting gameplay to that of games like gears of war. But mass effect had 1 thing that made all of us play it freneticly - the story. We made our own story based on what we did in the game. And while this is the most important part of this game, this is where bioware went into dark space deeply. On a second playthrough the story feels even shitier than before and some gameplay elements make me wish i had my mako recon back. No matter what you do, weather you spend 20 hours in the game doing just the main story or over 40h doing all side missions and uncovering all assests possible, you get the same fkin ending. Imagine if in ME2 no matter how much loialty missions/ship upgrade you did, you would still have half the crew killed and you would be obligated to keep the colectors base. If you made the mistake of romancing Miranda or Jack in the second game, al you get now is a pararomance crap. If you saved the rachni queen you get to save her ass again. I mean seriously ... the first rachni war was due to reapers, and now that stupid bitch got reaped again. Wow ... such a cool and original turn of events. And the main part - the reaper story ... that is just awsome.


This pic prety much explains it exacty how the massive brains of bioware thought of it.
As for gameplay - the reaper awarness is just stupid. Most of the times assets are split in odd locations within the solar system and i was so fkin tired of a continuous hit and run, that made me lose way more time than scanning a few planets for stuff. Thank god for the coalesced editor and the semi modable game. The cover system alot of times works against you, and in the frenetic shooting sesions you end up moving side cover to side cover just cause the system fails to change cover direction fast enough. Not to mention the tons of times when instead of pushing/interacting i went into cover cause the system once again was to slow to differenciate between action and cover.
So to put it in short - the main feature of this trilogy is where bioware failed hard, because i wont judge ME by its gameplay. The gameplay was good, but was absolutly nothing special and failed to deliver a true experience for either of the 2 mixed genres. And since the heart of the game was an absolute crap, the game itself for me is an absolute crap.

Edited by Anubis, 17 March 2012 - 08:22.

[Sgt. Rho]

Actually, the purpose of the reapers is

Spoiler

equal to that of the shivans in freespace: Kill organic civilisations once they become advanced enough, to allow more primitive civilisations to flourish, and thus allow life to go on instead of stagnating. The idea isn't new. The catalyst merely warned you that soon organics would create synthetics again and all that crap would start again.

[CJ]

100 bucks says the DLC called "The Truth" will be the real end of the game. Apparently the actual end is just in Shepard's mind after him/her being indoctrinated.

[Alias]

Spoiler tags motherfuckers, do you speak it.

Edited by Alias, 17 March 2012 - 09:05.

[Anubis]

Rho - while that would be A purpose, the ancient AI clearly states that organic life eventualy creates synthetics that will destroy them. So he created the reapers to stop that from happening. The point was synthetics wouldve killed all organic life while reapers just kill advanced organic life. But the overall purpose is what it is.
Alias - what fkin spoiler - the gameplay part i talked about was presented by bioware weeks ago and the story part is by now well known and all over the internet.

Edited by Anubis, 17 March 2012 - 09:08.